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Maria Judite de Carvalho

Biography

Maria Judite de Carvalho (18 September 1921-19 January 1998) remains one of Portugal’s most important women writers of the second half of the 20th century. A gifted painter and caricaturist, her professional career was spent in journalism, as an editor and columnist, and she translated a number of French works into Portuguese. As a creative writer, she excelled at the short story and novella, though she also wrote a novel, poetry and a play. She was born and educated in Lisbon, with secondary education at the French College for girls and an undergraduate degree in Germanic Philology at the University of Lisbon. In 1949 she married a fellow student, Urbano Tavares Rodrigues, writer, critic, and steadfast opponent of the Salazar regime. They started married life that year in Montpellier, France, where Rodrigues taught at the university. Their daughter was born in Lisbon in 1950, and Carvalho returned to France in 1952 when her husband took up a new post in Paris. Among the literary and artistic contacts they made there were Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Vieira da Silva. In 1955, Carvalho and Rodrigues returned to Portugal and Lisbon remained Carvalho’s home for the rest of her life.

She published her first story, ‘O Campo de Mimosas’, in 1949 in the Portuguese women’s magazine, Eva, and, from 1953 onwards, a number of crónicas [newspaper columns]. Back in Lisbon, her first collection, Tanta Gente, Mariana, comprising a novella and seven short stories, was ready to go press in 1955; on its publication in 1959, it made an immediate critical impact. Over her lifetime, Carvalho published eight further volumes of stories, a novel, and two collections of crónicas written over a professional career spanning the years 1968 to 1984. A volume of poems and a play were published posthumously. Six times a literary prize-winner, she was also honoured posthumously with the Vergílio Ferreira Prize for her lifetime achievement.

Carvalho was a writer of great concision and restraint. Her characters, mainly urban middle class, appear to lead ordinary, uneventful lives, composed of home, school, office, and cafés. These environments are described realistically: she has the trained observation of a painter, watching from the sidelines. The psychology, motives, words and deeds of her characters are relayed through an ironic narrator. When not detached, the first-person viewpoint is ruthlessly honest. To read her stories is to enter the limited, frustrated world of the Portuguese authoritarian regime (which came to an end in 1974, but the social effects of which lingered on for decades). Here, the prohibitions, secrecy and fear of outside influences have imprinted on her protagonists a frustration or self-imposed repression that, however, are never explicitly linked to Salazar’s New State. She was a writer of hints, of glancing remarks, of social criticism, who left the reader to fill in the narrative and emotional gaps. As a newspaper editor and columnist, she faced actuality on a daily basis. She saw the changes, slow and halting, in women’s domestic and professional roles as the 1960s got under way. But she also understood the pitfalls of modernisation, the potential dehumanising of technological innovations, the pressures of consumerism on people, particularly women, insufficiently educated to counter them with the irony and maturity she herself possessed. In that regard, her crónicas are as much education as entertainment.

Tanta Gente, Mariana set the tone of all her subsequent work. Seen here are the great thematic constants: isolation, loneliness, frustration, disappointment, the passage of time, bitter memories, and the inability to communicate. Like Mariana, the protagonist of the novella of the title, Carvalho depicted men and women as islands, even when in the company of friends or of their closest partners. Another constant impression is that of lives wasted. Some of her (typically) early 1930s female protagonists are passive and have allowed an unsatisfactory relationship to drift on over the years. Devoid of guile or manipulation, they remain an accessory rather than the central fact of their men’s lives, and suffer accordingly. Right from the start, Carvalho showed uncanny perception about old people and their gradual socio-economic isolation. Here, it may be ventured, she drew on her familiarity with Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas, both in Le Deuxième Sexe and La Vieillesse. As Urbano Tavares Rodrigues revealed in an interview with Jane Pinheiro de Freitas (2011), Carvalho was deeply impressed by Le Deuxième Sexe, which she read when living in Paris, and she subsequently read all that Beauvoir published. It is not hard to see in the last collection of stories, Seta Despedida, the same sociological concerns as in La Vieillesse, nuanced by her imaginative insight into the attrition of time on human lives.

In only one collection, Os Idólatras (1969), did Carvalho turn her back on the past and memory, for a futuristic, fantasy world of the 21st century. This elicited a varied critical response, with João Gaspar Simões (1981) venturing that her creative genius lay with dissecting the absurdities of the world as it is, not in imagining a whole future, which in the nature of science-fiction precludes irony. In contrast, Alexandre Pinheiro Torres (1989) praised the collection as a strong indictment of capitalism, and Maria Alzira Seixo (1977) assessed the importance of Carvalho’s breaking her own boundaries.

Carvalho’s own rather sombre upbringing among elderly aunts, and a sequence of family bereavements – motherless at the age of eight, and then fatherless by the age of fifteen – undoubtedly influenced her outlook. Instinctively and temperamentally on the side of the melancholy and the overlooked, she depicted them without sentimentality; her sarcasm is directed at the thick-skinned, capable and pushy of this world, often a precocious teenage girl who knows she will be one of life’s winners.

Carvalho saw her last book, Seta Despedida, awarded several literary prizes. By this time, she was gravely afflicted with cancer. A woman of immense dignity, tenderness and reserve, she was not given to self-promotion or publicity. Her character is briefly evoked for us by Urbano Tavares Rodrigues, in a vignette entitled ‘Maria Judite de Carvalho, princesa da ironia’ (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, 2015) and, with Paula Morão, in a ten-minute video presented by Teresa Sampaio (Ler Mais Ler Melhor. Vida e obra de Maria Judite de Carvalho, 2011).

Perkins, Juliet: ‘As Time Goes By: Old Age and the Elderly in Maria Judite de Carvalho’s Seta Despedida’ in As Time Goes By: Portraits of Age ed. by Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 101-120)